Bypassing Albany: Native Americans and Marijuana

While, sadly, progress is a rare phenomenon in Albany, that should not mean that everyone has to suffer the consequences of our legislators’ intransigence. Fortunately, New York’s Native American tribes have the sovereign power to lead as lawmakers, and set the stage for substantive reform in the rest of the state.

Take marijuana legalization. Growing and selling marijuana on Indian reservations could provide a massive windfall for New York’s economically depressed tribes. Colorado, one of two states in the union to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes, has begun to demonstrate how much money doing away with the nonsensical policy of prohibition against pot can yield by collecting $2 million in tax revenue in January alone, the first month it went on sale. And that figure does not include the $1.5 million in taxes generated over the same period by medical marijuana, as well as all of the ancillary financial benefits that come from the industry, like job creation and tourism.

Gabriel Galanda, a partner in the Native American-owned law firm of Galanda Broadman, explained in a 2011 op-ed: “Indian Country has the sovereignty, tax status, land base, agricultural savvy and business intangibles to really make legalized marijuana happen. For some rural tribes, those attributes are all they have to leverage economically.”

Many tribes have already built successful businesses based on some of New Yorkers’ so-called vices, namely cigarettes and gambling. Unlike with tobacco, however, the tribes will not have to import the crop from out of state to produce their local brands. Marijuana can be grown on reservations both outdoors and indoors, thus creating more employment opportunities and yielding a higher profit for people badly in need of any new means of economic stimulus they can get. Plus, no geographic exclusivity agreements complicate the issue, as they do in the case of casinos.

Legalization would also put an end to the scapegoating of reservations as pipelines for the illegal drug trade. In a recent pro-legalization piece for the Indian Country Today Media Network, Charles Kader points out how the St. Regis Indian Reservation in New York’s North Country “has been repeatedly blamed by state and federal officials for a significant volume of high-grade marijuana entering the United States.” Legalization would close this corridor of black market smuggling by eliminating its reason to exist.

Critics will likely bring up the substance abuse epidemic that has historically plagued Native Americans to argue that legalization will only exacerbate that tragedy. This concern, which must be taken very seriously, needs to be addressed on the facts. That alcohol, banned on many reservations across the country, is legal has done little to curb alcoholism on tribal lands, and dozens of studies over the past decades have shown that the legalization of marijuana does not lead to an increase in its usage. Moreover, with legalization, those who need treatment will no longer face the compounded difficulty of being branded as criminals.

In February the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council took the first step toward legalizing recreational marijuana on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Some time soon the Tribal Council will decide whether to allow a public referendum on the proposed measure, which, if approved, will reportedly make Pine Ridge the first reservation in the country to legalize marijuana.

With national public opinion moving rapidly in favor of legalization, and Colorado showing how much states have to gain by giving the people what they want, full-fledged legalization in the United States appears increasingly less a matter of if than when. Why shouldn’t New York’s Indian reservations reap the benefits of this inevitability now and show Albany what it’s missing?